


concentricity

by haedeluna



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Fluff and Smut, Getting Together, Humor, Jaemin is a Cute Alien, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Rating will change, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Tags to be added, Tentacle Sex, side donghyuck/chenle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:00:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28184298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haedeluna/pseuds/haedeluna
Summary: But in their mornings together, it’s like for a brief, luminous moment, Renjun — dignified, snarky, enigmatic, brilliant, wonderful Renjun — is just a boy in Jaemin’s bed and there’s nothing between them, nothing at all.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Na Jaemin
Comments: 18
Kudos: 154





	concentricity

**Author's Note:**

> george lucas sweetie i'm so sorry
> 
> quick notes: any and all of the science-fiction in this fic may or may not be completely accurate, i went to school for words not biology pls do not @ me i'm doing my best! also this fic WILL be E-rated in the next chapter [stares at tentacle tag] you have been warned! 
> 
> thanks to my beta cj as always! jaemin’s tail in this fic is dedicated to rachel ♡
> 
> i hope you enjoy ( ◜◒◝ )♡

“That isn’t right.” Jaemin frowns over Renjun’s shoulder at his holopad screen. “This isn’t what my heart looks like at all.”

“I don’t remember asking you.” Renjun swats Jaemin’s hand away that’s inching closer to the screen. “Leave me alone.”

“Considering it’s _my_ heart, I think I know what I’m talking about.” 

Renjun pinches at the screen to zoom out on the image, not looking at Jaemin. “I _said_ , leave me alone.” 

“I’m just trying to help you, you know. One day you’re going to cut open an N’dorii to perform an emergency bypass and accidentally kill the poor bastard.”

Renjun bristles. He whips around to Jaemin and brandishes his holopad stylus like a scalpel. “Maybe I’ll cut you first.”

“That doesn’t seem aligned with the Hippocratic oath.”

“It’s almost zero-hundred already, and I’m not even halfway through amphibious cardiology yet, and tomorrow I have the hardest exam of my entire life—”

“You say that about every exam, and yet you always ace them,” Jaemin quips. 

“— And if you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you in one of the emergency pods and send you to kriffing Andromeda.”

“Harsh.”

“Try me.” Renjun turns back to his screen, determined to ignore Jaemin for the rest of the night. 

“You can just say midnight, you know. You don’t have to be so militant all the time.” Jaemin’s breath brushes the shell of Renjun’s ear, a static fizzle he feels through his entire body. And Renjun realizes all at once how close Jaemin is to his face, chin hovering over his shoulder. 

Renjun scoots out from his desk to put some distance between them. He glares at Jaemin with all the cool condescension he can muster. “The textbook isn’t _wrong_. It’s science.” 

“Science is only as infallible as the sentients who study it,” Jaemin says. “It can always be wrong.” 

Unfazed, Jaemin taps his finger on the pulmonary artery in the N’dorii heart diagram, drawn in simple red and blues. It blossoms in the air into a photo-realistic hologram projected from the screen. Straightforward, like all the diagrams in Renjun’s xenospecies biology digitexts on his holopad. Which he paid far too many credits for at the university store. 

“There should be a valve here,” Jaemin says, clearly pleased to know something Renjun doesn’t. “Like those animals on your planet you always compare me to. We have a right-to-left aortic shunt.”

“Wait. Isn’t that a developmental defect?” Renjun’s scientific curiosity gets the better of his annoyance at Jaemin. “That means the oxygen-poor blood circulates back into the oxygen-rich — but how do you not have hypoxemia?” 

Jaemin shrugs, the movement languid, and crosses his arms. He’s shed the burnt orange jacket of their academy uniform, wearing just the standard black turtleneck undershirt tucked into his utility belt. Their uniform is nondescript, utilitarian, designed for efficiency and range of motion. But Jaemin somehow makes it look as cutting-edge as the streetwear on some of the more contemporary colonies planetside. 

“You’re gonna have to take that one up with evolution. I’m in aviation div, remember? You tell me.” 

“How do you not know! It’s your heart.” That’s something about Jaemin that has never clicked with Renjun — his lack of desire to _know_ , to pull on strings until something unravels. Jaemin is smart as hell, sometimes too smart for his own good. It takes one to know one, for Renjun. But Jaemin seems at peace with letting the mysteries of the universe sail by him, untouched, like ships in the night. 

It’s unfathomable.

“Do you understand the workings of your own heart?” Jaemin shifts closer and leans one hip against Renjun’s desk, looking down his nose at him. It feels like he’s poking at the edges of what he really means, instead of just coming outright with it and saving them both the trouble. Renjun can’t grasp what, though. Their typical games. And they both play them well. 

“Do you know why your heart goes on?” Jaemin snorts at his own joke. “Isn’t that a famous song on your planet? I don’t know why I’m alive. I just am.” 

Renjun pushes his glasses up his nose and studies Jaemin for a minute. 

Jaemin could pass for human at quick glance: the straight lines of his nose, the ashy strands falling over thick brows into his yellow eyes, the olive tint of his skin washed out by the cold light of Renjun’s solar lamp. 

Until you notice his tall, pointed ears, webbed like fish fins. Or the green speckles of face markings next to his eyes that disappear into his hair. Or the pattern of faint pseudo-scales, faded from millennia of evolution after his ancestors left the water for good, that trace up the backs of his arms. 

Or his tail. That usually gives him away. 

Renjun stares him down, but Jaemin betrays no tell. 

“I think you’re fucking with me,” he decides. 

“And why,” Jaemin purrs, leaning down to rest both hands on the armrests of Renjun’s desk chair, crowding into his space, “would I do that?”

Renjun recognizes the challenge and rises to meet it. He’s never been able to resist a provocation — even when he knows Jaemin is deliberately goading him. Maybe especially then. “So that I fail my exam tomorrow and I have to drop out in disgrace, and I never see a starship med bay after all.” 

“You could fail every single one of your exams at this point in the term and still pass with flying colors,” Jaemin points out. He blinks. If Renjun watches closely enough, he can see Jaemin’s second eyelid membrane follow the motion, like a camera shutter only a millisecond behind. “So that’s unlikely.”

Renjun narrows his eyes. “Or maybe, you want me to fail so that you beat me out for the top of our class. I see the game you’re playing, Na. It’s not going to work.” 

Jaemin just gleams at him with his huge, yellow eyes, and grins lazily, his canines too razor sharp to ever pass for human. They’re one of the more obvious anatomical differences between Renjun’s human body and Jaemin’s — _mostly_ human-shaped one.

That, and his stupid heart, apparently. 

“My heart works just fine,” Jaemin says, smug, insufferable. 

Renjun says nothing but doesn’t drop Jaemin’s gaze. Until finally, after a long beat, “If it’s true, I don’t understand how you’re alive. When that appears in mammals, it has to be corrected or it’s fatal.”

“I don’t know, Renjun.” Jaemin grabs Renjun’s hand and presses it, palm flat, to his own sternum. His hand feels like it’s calloused, though it’s only that his epidermis is thicker and tougher than a human’s. His hand that eclipses Renjun’s own is cool to the touch. But it still scorches against Renjun’s skin. 

Renjun catalogues all these differences in the methodical way his brain works. He has a scientist’s brain, one made to pick out patterns and synthesize data. That’s all it is. Jaemin is cold-blooded, of course, but his pulse thrums under Renjun’s palm all the same. Same as Renjun’s. But much steadier. 

Renjun can feel Jaemin’s voice in his own palm when he says, “Don’t I feel alive to you?” 

Renjun snatches his hand away and cradles it as if burned. 

“I’ll puke on you,” he threatens. “Directly on you. Somewhere far, far away from the hospital wing where no one can hear you scream.”

 _Homo sapiens_ ’ stomach acids are poisonous — deadly so — to N’dorii. This much, at least, Renjun’s textbook must have gotten right, because Jaemin blanches. “You wouldn’t dare.” 

“Give me a reason, and I swear I will.” 

Jaemin relents at last. Renjun turns back to his holopad. But he listens to Jaemin busy himself at his closet, the sounds of cloth against scales as he undresses and changes into sleep clothes. Then he flops onto his bunk with a _whumph_. 

Behind him, Renjun hears Jaemin twist over to switch a button on his bed, and it whirs on. Jaemin settles back into it with a contented hum. All of the cold-blooded xenospecies students have heated mattresses, with time-control options for when to blaze on in the morning, keeping their muscles loose. It’s because their body heat dips when they sleep. Jaemin will be stiff and unable to even twitch his tail if he wakes up without a heat source. 

Seems like another evolutionary disadvantage, Renjun thinks with a sniff. Clearly an inferior species. If that weren’t obvious before. 

Having a xenospecies roommate is a lot less exciting than Renjun originally daydreamed about, as a starry-eyed freshman boarding the N-0409 Constellation Technology Institute for the first time. For one, Jaemin is nothing like how Renjun’s anthropology digitexts described N’dorii to be. _Stoic and stone-faced, the N’dorii are an intensely private species, having allowed only a handful of researchers to study their culture and behavior on their home planet of Du’reem_. _They are aggressive, prone to violence, and should be approached with caution_.

“Houston, we have a problem!” Jaemin chirped, barging into their dorm room. 

It was the first time they met on freshman orientation day. Jaemin made himself at home on Renjun’s bunk and slung his arm around his shoulders, ignoring Renjun’s squeak. 

“That’s how humans greet each other on your planet, right? I’ve seen all the _homo sapiens_ movies. The space ones, at least. Where is Houston, anyway? I’m starving. Come to the cafeteria with me?” 

His steamroller affection aside, Jaemin is as average as a roommate could be, relatively speaking. Renjun hasn’t had any complaints. None that prevented him from staying with Jaemin these past four years. Jaemin is clean and tidy, almost as obsessively as Renjun. He puts up with Renjun’s manic phases when he falls into a research vortex, pulling all-nighters to finish his papers on time. If Jaemin cares, he doesn’t say anything. 

And Renjun always wakes up at his desk in a puddle of his own drool where he’s fallen asleep on his holopad, with Jaemin’s blanket tucked around his shoulders and a mug of chamomile steaming next to him. 

Jaemin is strictly a carnivore, so Renjun’s nuke-wave ramen stash is safe. Even though it created a more uncomfortable problem that time Renjun found a mouse in a cupboard when they were cooking dinner. How it got into a communal kitchen pantry, on a spaceship in a far-flung corner of the Resonance Nebula, Renjun has no idea. Jaemin spotted it and his eyes went all glassy and black. Renjun had to lecture him firmly that there would be absolutely no live mammal eating under his roof. Not now, not ever. He pouted for a week.

Renjun knows Jaemin goes out, knows that he has a vibrant social life outside the steel walls of their dorm unit. But he’s never brought anyone back to their room.

As far as Renjun knows, anyway. He doesn’t _want_ to know. 

They aren’t friends, exactly. At least not in the way that he would feel comfortable to ask. Renjun is almost grateful for it. This way, he doesn’t have to compare his own lack of a dating life to whatever Jaemin’s is like. 

He truly doesn’t want to know. 

It’s better this way. Renjun compares himself to Jaemin enough. Both of their academic records are flawless — not that it matters, given Jaemin is in the aviation division while Renjun is medical, except for overall class rank. But there’s not much of a difference there. He’s thankful for that at least, that he doesn’t feel the molten sear of jealousy pooling low in his belly when they compare grades. 

No, Renjun only feels that heat when Jaemin comes back from the showers, towel slung low under the flat planes of his abdomen, the whipcord muscles of his body still wet, broader and more defined than Renjun could ever come close to being. The sharp points of his spine ridge, exposed. The hints of mottled green scales across his back, down his thighs. His tail, almost as thick as his torso and long enough to brush the floor, spiked and plated like a primordial sea predator. 

Then Jaemin drops his towel and takes far longer than necessary searching for a change of clothes. And Renjun averts his eyes and pointedly does not wonder what scales feel like against soft skin. 

Stupid kriffing overgrown lizard. Renjun wants to push him out of an air lock. 

There were cultural differences to adjust to, as well. Sometimes his anthropology digitexts get things right. 

_The N’dorii are deeply intimate, and it’s uncommon to witness a social gathering without physical affection abound. Even between strangers, they greet others of their kind with open arms in the most literal sense. Kissing, caressing, and even mating_ — Renjun blushed at this part and checked fervently over his shoulder that Jaemin was distracted — _are as common as a handshake in other cultures. However, despite their blasé attitude, N’dorii rely on touch as almost a psychological need, and can experience painful withdrawals if they go without for extended periods of time._

A few weeks into their sophomore year, Renjun came back late after a night class to find all the solar lights off. And Jaemin, huddled in bed, curled with his pillow clutched tight in his arms. 

“Jaemin?” Renjun said, hushed.

He met Renjun’s gaze. His eyes were wet. 

And something in Renjun’s rib cage stretched and twisted, a sore muscle pulled taut.

He crossed the room and nudged Jaemin’s knee. “Scooch over.”

Jaemin stared at him, uncomprehending. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, trying to be surreptitious about it and failing. “What are you —”

“Stars above, you stupid reptile, make some room.” Renjun climbed into his bunk next to him, paused for an uncomfortable heartbeat, then hesitantly opened his arms wide. “Come here.”

Jaemin stared. Another beat that stretched the breadth of the Milky Way galaxy. And Renjun’s nerves whirled in a tailspin, certain that he’d misread the situation entirely, and Jaemin was about to shove him onto the cold metal floor. 

Then Jaemin let go of the pillow between them, dropped it behind his back. And he carefully nudged into Renjun’s space and slotted his head into his shoulder. Renjun wrapped his arms around Jaemin, careful to avoid his spine ridge. 

And Renjun felt the wired ball of tension in Jaemin’s broad shoulders loosen instantly. He all but melted into Renjun’s arms. 

“Oh,” Jaemin breathed. “That’s better.”

Renjun pulled him in tighter and rested his chin on top of his head, trying to be begrudging about it, if there was even a way to do so. “If you tell anybody about this.”

He felt Jaemin’s laugh more than he heard it, a low, seismic rumble. “Wouldn’t dream of it. I know you’re good with a knife. I’ve seen your dissections.”

“I’m serious,” Renjun said, even as his eyelids grew heavy. He really needed to ask the RA about getting a heated mattress of his own. He could get used to this. “Okay? This is a one-time-only deal.” 

It was not, in fact, a one-time-only deal. Not even close.

And if Renjun wakes up in Jaemin’s bed more often than his own, especially in the colder months, when N-0409 CTI drifts further in orbit from its red giant than usual —

Well. Renjun has always had a hard time saying no to Jaemin. And what kind of roommate would that make Renjun if he did? If he said no?

It’s symbiosis, mutually beneficial to the both of them, like what Renjun learned in marine biology. 

Jaemin doesn’t carry the weight in his shoulders like he used to. And Renjun gets to pretend, even if it’s only until sunrise, that he has something more to wake up to in the morning, more than his assignments and his lab sessions and his small, provincial life. 

But that was then, and this is now. Renjun thinks he may have finally gotten some peace and quiet. Until Jaemin says from his bunk, “You’re doing that thing again.”

Renjun huffs and spins in his chair to face him. “What thing?”

“That thing where you start to slump over your desk when you’re about to fall asleep on it.” He blinks, a portrait of innocence. His clavicle is bare under his blanket, dotted with the same green markings by his eyes, but fainter — has Renjun never noticed them before? Like freckles, he thinks, with a curious little thrill he feels twist behind his navel. 

“You’re — what’s the human phrase? Burning the night gas? You should come to bed.”

“Burning the midnight oil.” Renjun rubs his itching eyes. “I don’t respond to your every beck and call, you know.”

Jaemin rolls onto his side to face Renjun fully. “Don’t you?” he says, in the low and self-satisfied way that makes Renjun want to pummel him, the way when he knows Renjun is only putting up an argument to save face, an argument that Jaemin has already won. 

“I’ve almost finished this chapter.” It’s a bit desperate. Renjun resents it immediately.

“Your textbook will still be there tomorrow.” 

Renjun gnaws the cuticle of his left thumb. “My exam, though,” he says again, but it’s weak even to his own ears.

And Jaemin must know this, too, because he pats the empty space in his bunk next to him expectantly. 

Renjun doesn’t bother continuing this dance. There’s no point, when they both know exactly where it will end. 

“Okay,” Renjun says, and then, again, “Okay.” 

He picks up his holopad from the stand and clutches it to his chest, an anchor.

“I’m going to go wash my face and put on pajamas. But I’m bringing this with me and studying for another hour before I actually sleep.” And then, one more time, like the vinyl artifacts he’s seen in museums in the ancient history exhibits — a broken record, “Okay?”

“Okay,” Jaemin says, voice edging with a laugh. 

Renjun can feel Jaemin’s eyes on him as he stands and shrugs his uniform jacket off without ceremony, then the undershirt. He drops them into the laundry basket for the chores-drones to pick up. His hands are unsteady as he undoes his belt. 

In the corner of his eye, Jaemin is still watching, yellow gaze almost cat-like, his cheek on his pillow. 

“Didn’t your mother tell you it’s rude to stare?” Renjun bites. It comes out thin. 

“I’ve never met my egg-mother,” Jaemin says. But he rolls onto his back, blessedly choosing to study the ceiling instead. “Our family systems work a little differently on Du’reem than on Earth.”

Renjun tries to think of something to say to that, casting around for an option that doesn’t sound xenophobic or condescending. He comes up with radio silence. 

He settles on, “Oh. Kriff, I’m… sorry? If that’s something that was... difficult. For you.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Jaemin says, turning back to him with a small smile. “I was raised by my broodmother. She’s my real mom. That’s the way things go.” And then, quieter, “But thank you. That was kind.” 

Renjun realizes with a swooping feeling, like stepping into anti-grav, that he feels naked, and not just because he’s shirtless. He hurries to change into pajamas.

When he returns from the bathroom, face scrubbed clean, Jaemin is still. His eyes are closed and he’s breathing deeply. But when Renjun slips under the covers next to him, onto his back, Jaemin turns into his side and buries his face into the dip of Renjun’s neck. Renjun feels Jaemin go loose against him. 

And Renjun’s own muscles relax despite themselves, a re-aligning of his center of gravity. Must be the heated mattress. Renjun _really_ needs to bribe the RA for one. 

He feels a leather-soft brush against his foot, when Jaemin hooks the tip of his tail around his ankle. His hand smoothes across Renjun’s chest into place, over his heart. “Night night,” he mutters, voice thick with sleep. “Don’t let the dust bunnies bite.”

And Renjun doesn’t have the time to correct him on the mistaken colloquialism. Jaemin is already under. 

After a few moments, once Jaemin’s breathing has evened out and slipped into tiny snores, Renjun scrolls back to the diagram of the N’dorii cardiac system. 

He highlights the text about the pulmonary artery and types in a note for himself for later. _Crocodile heart._

Renjun does this thing. It drives Jaemin insane.

When Jaemin’s eyes open in the morning, he might be a little bleary, but for the most part he’s wide awake. He knows humans vary in this regard, but they usually aren’t like that. 

He knows a lot of them drink a highly addictive chemical called caffeine in the morning just to kick-start their energy, sometimes multiple times a day. Because humans are kriffing insane. Honestly, they scare Jaemin. 

Renjun is one of those humans. He’s pretty much dead to the world until he has the sludgy stuff in the cafeteria hall every morning. 

And when he wakes up on Jaemin’s pillow, hair mussed on one side and cheeks flushed as a ripe peach, his body warm and loose against Jaemin’s chest — besides being so utterly, distressingly kissable that Jaemin has to bite his own lip from giving in to the need — Renjun is groggy as hell. 

So he never remembers his sleep-talking.

Usually it’s only a few words, as Renjun rises out of the tides of sleep and resurfaces, eyes blinking to clarity. Sometimes he mumbles something, then rolls back over and slips back into sleep for a while. Sometimes he’s talking even before he opens his eyes.

Sometimes he says Jaemin’s name. 

But it’s usually nonsense, garbled thoughts and half-formed phrases. Renjun once turned to him, eyes still closed, and announced, calm and clear as day, “Banana pancakes.” Then Jaemin woke him up because he was laughing so hard. 

Sometimes he murmurs a few words of his native tongue, the lilting, beautiful language that Jaemin has come to recognize from when Renjun whispers it: _Hello. Good morning. I’m hungry_. 

Renjun’s words, though — they’re little treasures that Jaemin holds onto, greedily and close to his chest. Little parts of Renjun that nobody else gets to have, all for him. His own personal dragon hoard that he hasn’t earned, doesn’t even deserve, but he tucks them into the jewel box in his chest, anyway, and tries not to let their edges cut his throat on the way down. 

N’dorii don’t typically vocalize much when they’re — well, intimate. At least, not in Jaemin’s experience. Maybe it’s because sex in Jaemin’s culture is as everyday an activity as using the bathroom, or eating bug larvae for dessert. It’s _normal_. Not overly clinical and sanitized, a means to an end, like for some species. Or simultaneously exalted and condemned as sin in human culture. (Again. Humans. They scare him.)

Humans vocalize during sex as an evolutionary thing, passed down from their primate ancestors. And probably also because it’s hot and humans are nothing if not the horniest creatures in the galaxy, fuck what the textbooks say. Why else would they have crowded their native planet to the point of an overpopulation crisis? 

They were honestly doomed from the start. Jaemin has no idea why his stupid, primordial braincells would ever be attracted to one. One, in particular, anyway. 

But this thing. This thing that Renjun does that drives him out of his mind. 

It’s the _noises_ Renjun makes, sometimes, when he snuggles closer into Jaemin’s chest when he’s still asleep, before he wakes up and remembers that he hates Jaemin. Little sighs of contentment. A happy hum when Jaemin cards his fingers through his hair. A deeper, breathy groan when he stretches his arms above his head and blinks blearily up at Jaemin with a small smile, oblivious, and whispers, “Morning.” 

And Jaemin can’t speak, can’t even breathe. What’s the human phrase? Tongue-tied. He chokes out a, “Good morning,” and wills his crocodile heart to please start working again.

Renjun is always so armored, is the thing. He guards himself like the deflector shields around N-0409 CTI, completely transparent, so easy to read every emotion that plays across his face, but impossible to pierce beneath the surface. He’s in Jaemin’s arms every night but he’s unknowable. 

But in their mornings together, it’s like for a brief, luminous moment, Renjun — dignified, snarky, enigmatic, brilliant, wonderful Renjun — is just a boy in Jaemin’s bed and there’s nothing between them, nothing at all.

It makes no kriffing sense. And all Jaemin wants to do is peel back every layer of Renjun’s carefully-cultivated defenses and take him apart.

Then his imagination takes hold. Jaemin wonders what those sleepy noises would taste like against Renjun’s rose-petal mouth on his, what other sounds he could draw over and over again from Renjun’s throat, if he would curse, if he would say Jaemin’s name on the heels of a moan, if he would beg for _more_ and _yes_ and _please_ —

And Jaemin wants to throw himself into a wormhole. 

He doesn’t want to think about any of it. It’s not allowed. Because Renjun is _not_ his mate, and probably doesn’t even consider him a friend. He isn’t allowed to feel any type of way about Renjun’s dark eyes, or the soft skin behind his round ears, or the curve at the small of his back that looks like it was made for Jaemin’s palm. 

He tries telling his heart that. It’s a comforting lie. 

Jeno’s fist connects with Jaemin’s jaw. 

His head jerks back with a sharp snap of pain. The punch is pillowed by the sparring glove on Jeno’s hand, but only just. 

“Pay attention,” Jeno scolds. His voice is softly accented, never having gotten the hang of Common vowels. 

“Don’t know why you’re nagging _me_.” Jaemin pats his face delicately and stretches his jaw, testing the ache. He’s lucky it isn’t dislocated. Jeno might be sparring, but he doesn’t hold his punches. “You’re the one who just bruised the moneymaker.”

“As if your skin is that thin,” Jeno says over his shoulder as he retreats to the bench. He takes a long drag from his bottle and wipes his mouth. “You must have been distracted by my good looks.” 

Jaemin doubles over, clutching his stomach, and fakes a retching sound. 

Jeno sticks his tongue out at him, to Jaemin’s laugh. Jeno’s tongue is stained a deep blue color from the electrolyte-enhanced liquid in his bottle. It’s almost the same indigo color as his facial markings and webbed ears, and his pseudo-scales a soft lilac — the tell-tale characteristics of southern N’dorii that set Jeno and Jaemin apart. 

Jaemin crosses the ring, one of the many that dot the sparring arena, to join Jeno on the bench. He takes a swig of his own electrolyte drink, grimacing at the fake-fruity taste. He’ll never get used to humans’ tendency to pump everything they create with fructose. 

“I was paying attention,” Jaemin says airily. “I just forgot you have shit aim. I won’t make the same mistake again.” 

Jeno raises his brows. “You are getting _soft_ on me.” 

“You wish,” Jaemin says, elbowing him hard in the side. “Come back to the ring with me, I’ll show you how soft I can be.”

“Please stop goading me with violence,” Jeno says, his eyes going crescent-moon-shaped the way they do when he’s fighting a smile. “Let us rest for a minute.” 

Jaemin allows their banter to lapse into companionable silence. He takes a deep breath, welcoming the familiar rubber-sweat smell of the gymnasium to fill his nose, and wishes it would clear his head. 

He would find silence uncomfortable with someone else, maybe — Jaemin has a big mouth, he’s aware, and he likes to use it — but Jeno has always been different. Maybe it’s their shared N’dorii heritage, their commonality that drew him to Jeno when they met during orientation. He was one of the few other N’dorii students in their year, even fewer now as they’ve progressed, and the subpar have been culled or dropped out from their rigorous training. 

Or maybe it’s just the quiet peace at the core of Jeno that Jaemin has always found shelter in. Jeno reminds Jaemin of the still marshes behind his childhood home in the dead of winter, when the aquatic life hunkers down under the ice to hibernate. He’s quiet, steady, but with much more under the surface than meets the eye. 

It was in that childhood home, on those marshes, that Jaemin was raised. He never had siblings — not that he knows of, anyway. His six other eggmates in his litter died before hatching. It’s a tragedy that’s dutifully accepted on Du’reem, as much a fact of life as the twin suns that rise in the east. Eggs rarely survive to infancy. Jaemin was strong enough to make it. 

He was brought up alongside a gaggle of other hatchlings taken in by his broodmother, who’s more like a cross between a governess and a schoolteacher than anything. Jaemin loves her, of course, and got along well with most of his broodmates. He just doesn’t know what it’s like to have a brother or a sister in the traditional sense. 

But as Jeno breaks his protein bug-meal bar apart and offers Jaemin the other half, Jaemin thinks that maybe family is less about blood, and more about who doesn’t want to see you go hungry. 

Jaemin accepts it from Jeno’s outstretched hand.

“Something is on your mind,” Jeno says gently. It’s not judgmental — just a statement of fact. Another thing Jaemin appreciates about Jeno, his unwillingness to push or prod, and instead lays the chess pieces on the table and lets Jaemin choose his play as he wishes. 

Jaemin sips from his bottle again. The manufactured sweetness is almost unbearable on his tongue. He swallows, sets the bottle down, avoiding Jeno’s eyes. 

Jaemin says, hoarse, “He slept in my bed again last night.” 

“Oh,” Jeno says. “He offered?”

“No,” Jaemin says, pained. “I asked him.”

When Jaemin meets Jeno’s gaze, it’s with wide eyes. “ _Ah’resh_.” It’s a term of familiarity in N’dorru for someone of the same age. But it’s closest to _brother_. “You are only causing more pain for yourself.”

“I know.” Jaemin pinches between his eyes with two fingers, bowing his head. “I’m a kriffing dumbass. You don’t have to remind me.”

Jeno breaks into a smile at that. “Yes.” He nudges Jaemin’s knee with his own. “That you are.” 

They’re silent for another beat, until Jeno says, “Have you spoken to him yet?”

“I don’t even know what I would _say_ , at this point,” Jaemin says slowly, the words thick and tight in his throat like it’s been coated with amber. “Especially in a way that wouldn’t make me sound like — I don’t know, like I’ve been taking advantage of him. How do I say, ‘I’ve been head-over-haunches in love with you for years, and I’ve been your roommate through it all, let you confide in me, let you sleep in my _bed_ , let you trust me with all that, but never said a word’?” 

“Heels,” Jeno says softly. “The phrase is head-over-heels.” 

“Thank you, linguistics div. Very helpful.” 

“Sorry,” Jeno says, sheepish. “I am just saying.”

He takes Jaemin’s hand in his own and threads their fingers together, ignoring the curious stares from other duos in the surrounding sparring rings. Jaemin resents that they can’t share physical affection that’s as normal on Du’reem as breathing, not without raised eyebrows and assumptions. Jeno’s touch is a comfort, a reassurance that he’s listening without having to say a word. Nothing more. 

Funny, Jaemin thinks, that there’s a whole course of study for how other species express themselves — the very division that Jeno is training in — and yet others are still so ignorant. 

Although Jaemin has to admit, the touch would be very different if it came from a small, human hand. 

“What are you running from?” Jeno says, dipping into N’dorru. “Why not tell him, and free yourself from this cage of your own making?” 

Jaemin snorts and responds in kind. “It’s nothing that dramatic.” 

Jeno blinks at him, eyebrows raised, just staring and saying nothing. He doesn’t have to. The message is obvious. Jaemin pokes two fingers into Jeno’s cheek and pushes his head to the side, playfully turning his head away. 

Jeno knocks his hand off. “You are acting like a hatchling,” he grumbles.

“It’s just, like...” Jaemin hems for a moment. “It’s like. We’ve been roommates for so long. And he’s the one thing I look forward to most in my day. And I’ve forgotten what it was like when I didn’t have him. And everything I feel for him is like, it’s so — it’s so _much_ , I don’t even know how I would put it all into words, and it’s been four years and — and it almost feels like too little, too late? I mean, we graduate in a few months. And then I’m gone.” He scuffs his training shoe into the rubber mat floor. “I’m out of _time_ , is the thing.”

“It is not too late,” Jeno says, in that gentle way when he’s unspooling Jaemin’s tangled threads of thought and weaving them into something coherent. “The only thing you are running out of is chances to tell him. Before he leaves and becomes the thing you regret for the rest of your life.”

“Yeah,” Jaemin says, switching back to Common. He feels a bit like all his organs are on the outside of his body, like the diagrams of digestive and muscle systems in Renjun’s digitexts. Turned inside out. “I get it.” 

“And then one day you are old and shriveled and molting and you have lost all your scales, wondering what ever happened to that cute _homo sapien_ you liked so much.”

“I said I get it,” Jaemin says, sullen. 

“I am just saying.” But Jeno leans into him in a way that feels like he’s trying to take the weight off of Jaemin’s shoulders, to let him carry it for a while. “I do not understand it, and I will not pretend to, _ah’resh_. But I am always here if you need someone to listen.” 

“You would get it,” Jaemin says. “You would get it if you met him.”

“All right,” Jeno says with a sigh. “A human? I doubt it. But you have always had questionable taste.”

“I’ll introduce you some day, then,” Jaemin says defensively, “and you’ll get it. I swear. Bet you five-hundred credits.”

“Five-hundred? It is a deal.”

“Deal.” 

They shake on the hand where their fingers are already laced together. 

“You’ll see.” 

“Oh, I know I will.”

Jaemin shoots him a look. Jeno is grinning, wide and guileless. 

“Actually,” Jaemin says, dropping his hand and jumping back to his feet, “on second thought. You’re not allowed anywhere near him. Get back in the ring.”

“Stars, it is worse than I thought.” Jeno has a smug little twinkle in his eye that Jaemin doesn’t like one bit. “Getting territorial. You are acting like he is your mate.”

Something sharp and hot hooks behind Jaemin’s navel and _yanks_. “Shut up. I said get in the ring.”

Jeno tuts. “Next time I see you, you will be making a nest in your bunk for your hatchlings—”

“Kriffing hell,” Jaemin seethes, storming back into the sparring ring, Jeno’s laughter dogging his heels. 

Like he said. Jeno doesn’t hold his punches.

Renjun watches with disgust as Chenle slurps down a mouthful of noodles so large, his cheeks puff out like a fish. 

“You’re a gremlin,” Donghyuck says, nonplussed, voicing exactly what Renjun was thinking. “Like, seriously, why is your mouth so big? Are you half Sku-rait?” 

Chenle wipes a spot of sauce off the corner of his full lips. Xutuns are notoriously unreadable, a species known for their cultural system based on logic and suppression of emotion. That, and their wide, upturned noses, like a bat’s. 

Chenle doesn’t smile. But he bares his razor teeth in an imitation of one. 

It’s cute, in a way, that Chenle goes to the effort of performing emotion for humans like Renjun and Donghyuck. Even though it’s usually to irritate, in Renjun’s case, or blatantly flirt.

Chenle still has a mouth stuffed with udon, but he manages, “You seem to like my big mouth.” 

Donghyuck’s tip of his nose goes pink, but he leans in conspiratorially to bump his forehead against Chenle’s. “Yeah. I do.”

Chenle swallows his udon. “How would you even breed with a Sku-rait? They’re just a blob with a mouth.” 

“Good question. Let’s ask the med div.” Donghyuck swivels back to Renjun. He steeples his fingers. “What do the reproductive systems of Sku-rait look like, o’ illustrious future medical officer?” 

“Does it have teeth like their mouth?”

“Does their mouth double as their—”

“Enough,” Renjun says, setting down his chopsticks, feeling a bit green. “Please. Saturn’s rings, you two are foul.” 

Chenle is the only one who can match Donghyuck’s level of equal parts wit and barb, save for maybe Renjun himself. Again, it would be adorable if it didn’t give Renjun a terminal case of third wheel syndrome, and a permanent migraine no neuro-pill can cure. 

“Why?” Donghyuck asks, innocent. “Do mentions of reproductive systems remind you of something? Or should I say, someone?”

Chenle pushes his massive bowl of udon and twirls it suggestively in front of Renjun’s nose. “Are these noodles triggering certain wiggly memories?” 

“I never should have told you what happened,” Renjun groans. He buries his face in his hands. Donghyuck dissolves into shrieking laughter and Chenle bares his teeth in his vicious not-grin. “I’ve created a monster with two heads.”

They’re on one of the outer decks connected to the cafeteria hall — “outer,” meaning, the entire starboard wall is a layer of ten-foot-deep glass. It allows for an unbroken view of the velvet-black universe outside the ship. Stars wink cheekily at N-0409 CTI as it drifts past, in its orbit around its home planet, Empatheia. She takes up about a third of the window view, whitish-orange like a mandarin with rind, and gouged with scars from centuries-old mining operations, long dried up. 

No one is really sure why Empatheia was abandoned. Common legend says the miners that once drilled under her icy crust found creatures that did not appreciate being woken. Now, she’s home to only a few hardy, run-down fishing villages and whatever secrets lurk in her depths. 

But N-0409 CTI docked on one of those colonies a few days back, a biweekly occurrence. And now Renjun, Chenle, and Donghyuck reap the benefits along with everyone aboard. Renjun slurps a bite of grilled eel, savoring the fresh meat. It’s all the more delicious after days of nothing but soggy tofu squares. 

“And neither of you are helping, either,” Renjun says. “Which was the whole point of telling you in the first place.” 

“So tell it to us again,” Donghyuck says. He clacks his chopsticks at him and leans his head on Chenle’s shoulder. “With feeling this time.” 

It happened that morning. 

When Renjun woke, Jaemin was still snoring, curled around Renjun against his back, cool to the touch even in the warmth of sleep and blankets. Renjun was a little sweaty and flushed, as he always is when he wakes up on Jaemin’s heated mattress. He nudged the covers off his legs. 

He’d done well on his bio exam on Monday after all, no thanks to Jaemin. He still had a few hours to kill before class, though. So as not to disturb Jaemin, Renjun grabbed his holopad from the bedside table and began working through his notes again, picking up where he left off in his digitext. 

His textbook was still on the page where he stopped, in N’dorii cardiology. It was a strange disconnect — or maybe too deep of a connection — to be studying the workings of the same body that was currently bracketing his, hand on his waist, swelling against Renjun’s back with every rise of his chest. The rivers of veins in the diagram on his holopad were the same as the veins in Jaemin’s wrist, the ones that Renjun could map with one finger if he wanted. It was enough to make him a bit furtive as he skimmed through the notes. 

Renjun swiped to the next subheading in the N’dorii chapter, read the title, and blinked. Read it again. 

_N’dorii Reproductive Systems._

He should have just skipped to the next chapter. Maybe then things would have gone differently.

But with no small amount of trepidation, Renjun scrolled further down on his holopad to read.

The chapter was — well, it was nothing short of informative. Did he zone out on this day in class? How did he not remember this? He would have remembered this. Surely his professor would have covered — 

Renjun stared at the diagram, his brain fuzzing out like comm-link static. A rush of heat swept through his every nerve ending when he understood what he was looking at.

And Jaemin, being the stupid exothermic creature that he is, noticed immediately. He nosed into Renjun’s neck — maybe he’d never been asleep at all — and said, low and lazy, “What’s the matter.”

Renjun slammed the holopad into his chest before Jaemin could see its screen over his shoulder. “Nothing.”

“It doesn’t sound like nothing,” Jaemin said, a little compressed from his cheek squished into his pillow. 

Renjun made to lunge out of the bed and Jaemin stopped him, the hand on his waist tightening to keep him in place. 

Jaemin said, throat still scratchy with sleep, “Is it another one of those weird dreams again? I told you, you can tell me what they’re about, I know they bother you—”

Renjun clamped down on his nervous giggle threatening to break free. “Stars. No. Not that.” 

He would _not_ be elaborating on the dreams that Jaemin makes frequent, devastating guest appearances in. Not then, not ever. 

Jaemin propped himself up on one elbow, leaning over Renjun. He worried his bottom lip with his teeth. “Okay, then what?” Jaemin asked, genuinely concerned, now. 

“I said, it’s nothing.” 

His eyes went to Renjun’s vice-grip on his holopad, holding it to his chest, like the hover-rafts students use to balance themselves during zero-grav practices. 

Jaemin’s brow furrowed. “Did something come up in your textbook that bothered you? I can help you study.”

Renjun died a thousand tiny deaths, and the cherry on top of the mooncake was that his face was still _burning_. “Jaemin, just — leave me alone and let me go. I need to get to class.”

“You don’t have class until one.” Jaemin’s yellow eyes darted back down to the holopad, the mental calculations clear behind them. 

And Renjun knew what Jaemin was going to do before he did it, but he still yelped when Jaemin grabbed for his holopad and yanked. 

Renjun braced himself and held fast. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“Let me see.”

“I don’t know if they teach you this on Du’reem, but sometimes sharing is _not_ caring,” Renjun said, wiggling out of Jaemin’s grip.

Jaemin swiped at Renjun again, who rolled over onto his stomach, caging in the holopad. 

“Did they teach you on Earth that it’s rude to keep secrets from your roommate?” Jaemin shot back, annoyed, a rare slip-up in his unflappable calm. 

And Renjun didn’t have time for the small, giddy bubble that inflated in his chest, for managing to land a hit under Jaemin’s armor. At shaking him for once in the way he so easily disarms Renjun. 

Because Jaemin shoved his hands under Renjun’s stomach and made a grab for the holopad. Renjun curled like an armadillo, fueled by panic and adrenaline, and rolled off of the bed, somehow landing on his feet. He sent a quick prayer of gratitude to his self-defense instructors for being so thorough. 

But Jaemin got hold of his wrist. He surged up and planted his knees into the mattress, poised at the edge of the bed. Deceptively casual. Because Renjun could feel how he was coiled taut from his grip on Renjun’s arm, the one not cradling his holopad like it was loaded with max-security Starfleet intel. 

“Renjun,” he said, the taunt blatant. “I’m a lot stronger than you, you know. This isn’t a fight you’ll win.” 

Renjun swallowed hard. He gave him the finger with his fist on the holopad. “Did they teach you what this means on Du’reem?”

“I think I missed that day of Human Sociology,” Jaemin said, silken. “Care to show me? I’m a visual learner.” 

Renjun tried to twist out of Jaemin’s vice-grip on his wrist. But woe to him, Jaemin was right. He was a lot stronger. “I’ll bite you. I’m not above physical violence.”

Jaemin, with his scary-fast predator reflexes, snagged the holopad in Renjun’s arms. _Kriff_. Renjun literally dug in his heels, as Jaemin slowly but surely pried the holopad from him and simultaneously pulled Renjun, closer and closer. 

“I’m gonna find out eventually—” 

Renjun’s arms were shaking with the exertion. “Get the kriff _off_ of me—”

“Listen—”

“Shut up—”

“Just let me—”

“ _No_!”

“Renjun—”

“I hate you,” Renjun hissed, getting up in Jaemin’s face almost nose-to-nose, hoping wildly that maybe intimidation will work, “I hate you so much, you miserable excuse for a lizard, you can never just leave well enough alone, you half-witted, scruffy-looking—”

“Who’s scruffy-lookin’?” Jaemin said, stilling for a moment. 

Too late, because Renjun chose that exact moment to rip the holopad as hard as he could from Jaemin’s hands, expecting his resistance and finding none. 

Renjun reeled, losing his balance. He tottered. He tried to over-correct and threw his arms around Jaemin’s neck to save himself.

Everything went still for a heart-stopping moment, his arms around Jaemin, both of them knowing what was about to happen and being powerless to stop it. 

And it was like slow-motion as Jaemin’s eyes went wide and panicked, even as he was pulled down with Renjun, both of them crashing to the floor. 

The holopad went flying. Jaemin landed on Renjun with a _whumph_ and a wheeze, Renjun’s hand in Jaemin’s hair, Jaemin’s elbow digging painfully into his hip-bone. Renjun’s head cracked with a spike of pain against the floor, and he bit his own tongue on a curse. Renjun was pretty sure he kneed Jaemin in the balls, because Jaemin folded in on himself with a groan of pain. 

All Renjun could think as he stared up at the ceiling, bruised and sore and probably on the fringes of a concussion, was that if this was some type of sign from the universe, he got the message loud and kriffing clear. 

Then he realized, to his horror, his fist was on top of the holopad screen, which was splintered completely. His hand must have hit it on the chapter he was studying. 

Because the holographic projection of the diagram was floating above it, working perfectly despite the cracked screen, showing clear as day, in excruciating, life-like detail—

“Kriffing hell,” Jaemin said, peeling his cheek off Renjun’s sternum where he’d landed. “Is that my _dick_?”

“And then I screamed, pushed him off, and ran out of our dorm room like a battle cruiser with three raiders on its tail,” Renjun finishes, with no small amount of agony. 

“You’re glossing over the best part!” Chenle says, something petulant escaping his usual iron-bar countenance. 

Renjun pokes his food around his plate with one chopstick, avoiding their eyes. “You know already. It—” His throat closes up. 

“What did it have, Renjun?” Donghyuck is rapt with attention, chin in hands, his eyes huge. “Elaborate. Spare no detail.”

“You _know_ what it had.” Renjun pulls his jacket collar from his neck to get some air. Why do they always jack up the heat on the outer cafeteria deck? To simulate a realistic al fresco dining experience? “Don’t make me say it.”

Chenle taps his chin, in mock contemplation. “I think I forgot. Remind me.”

Renjun hides his face in his hands again. 

“We’re waiting,” Donghyuck says cheerfully. 

Renjun wishes the artificial gravity of their college starship would fail and suck him into the icy void of space. 

“Tentacles,” Renjun moans, muffled behind his hands. “N’dorii males have tentacles around their dicks. Like a kriffing octopus. Are you two happy?”

Chenle and Donghyuck both howl with laughter this time, exactly the same as they did when Renjun told the story the first time. Chenle’s is fake, of course, but it still stings. 

“How did you _not_ know?” Donghyuck wheezes, still laughing a little and clutching his stomach. “I thought everyone knew about N’dorii males. It’s why everyone wants to fall in bed with one.”

“Do you know how many xenospecies I study in my classes?” Renjun stabs vengefully at his eel with his chopsticks. “They all blur together at some point.”

“Yeah, but you _live_ with him.” 

“It’s not like I see him — you know, naked, on a regular basis. I don’t look.” Usually. 

“You could if you wanted to, is the thing.”

“Do. Not. Start with me, Lee Donghyuck.”

“So how did Jaemin react to all this?” Chenle steals a bite of rice off of Donghyuck’s plate. 

“No idea,” Renjun says. “I bolted and hid in the dorm bathrooms until I knew he would have left for class. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do when I get back to the dorm tonight.”

“Oh, no, your hot roommate has a tentacle dick,” Chenle deadpans. “How ever will you go on.”

“Keep your voice down!” Renjun hisses, knowing his face is redder than his uniform jacket at this point. 

“Ooh,” Donghyuck says, his eyes going glazed and unfocused. “God, the _possibilities_. I can think of _so_ many.”

Renjun can, too. He clamps down on that train of thought to stem it like a tourniquet. 

“Guys, I feel like you’re forgetting I’m not into Jaemin,” he says, bristling. 

And when Donghyuck and Chenle catch each other’s eye and dissolve into hysterics again, he says, “No, hey, come on, you two are assholes! I know who I am. And I know Jaemin and me, it’s not—” He gestures helplessly between the two of them. “What you two have. Stop smiling at me like that! I kriffing hate you both.” 

“Whatever you say, baby,” Donghyuck says, wiping tears from his eyes. “I think this is all a very platonic reaction to finding out your roommate has a massive, throbbing—”

Renjun grabs the knife on his plate and presses it to Donghyuck’s jugular. “If you finish that sentence, I’m sending you to the med bay exsanguinated.” 

“Listen,” Chenle says, world-weary, knocking Renjun’s knife away, “I don’t have the time to be the sassy side character in the interspecies romantic comedy that is your life, Renjun. So let’s cut to the marrow of the issue. You two have lived with each other for almost four years and somehow never fought,” he reels off, ticking up a finger with each sentence. Renjun opens his mouth for a withering remark. “I’m not done. And bickering from unresolved sexual tension doesn’t count.” 

“It’s not—!”

“I said, I’m not done. Where was I? You neverfight. When you’re not with us or in class, you’re with him.”

“It’s not like I have any other friends.” Renjun tugs at his ear, that he can feel stinging redder by the second. “Or — people. In general. He’s not my friend.” 

“You could try talking to other people,” Donghyuck says. “Or a hobby.”

Renjun wrinkles his nose. “Why would I want to do that? That’s time wasted that I could use to study.”

Donghyuck visibly gives up. He motions to Chenle. “He’s hopeless. Go on.”

“Jaemin hasn’t dated anyone in, like, months, and we all know how N’dorii get when they haven’t gotten laid in a while.” Chenle ticks down another finger. 

Donghyuck nods sagely. “Like, feral.”

Renjun ignores the swoop of his stomach at the word _feral_ and tries to speak. “Wait, what? He isn’t dating? How do you know he hasn’t dated—”

“I have my sources,” Chenle says evenly. 

“Why do you care so much who he’s dating?” Donghyuck says immediately. 

“And he looks at you,” Chenle says, ticking yet another finger, “like you’re the center of the known universe, and you’re the Alpha Centauri that guides his way home. And kind of like he wants to eat you.” 

There’s a moment of silence, smug on Chenle and Donghyuck’s end and uncomfortable on Renjun’s, as he digests. 

“He does that to everyone. I’m not special,” Renjun dismisses, finally. 

Donghyuck and Chenle shoot him a look that’s pure pity. 

“Oh, honey,” Donghyuck says.

“Shut up!” Renjun hisses. His face is so flushed and hot it’s starting to go numb. “He doesn’t look at me like anything! He never looks at me at all, hardly. Stop _laughing_ , Donghyuck.”

Then Chenle leans in and drops to a whisper. “And I have it on good authority that you two sleep in the same bed.” 

Donghyuck actually gasps. Chenle sits back in his chair and laces his hands behind his head, a show of cockiness from an argument well-won. 

Renjun splutters. “How did — who told—! No one knows that? What—” 

Donghyuck says, gleeful, “Now _this_ is plot development.”

He gives up on coherent thought and surges across the table to grab Chenle by the collar, who is thoroughly unimpressed by it. “Who told you? I want a name.”

“No one told me, dumbass,” Chenle says, cooler than Empatheia’s frozen surface below them. “I came to your room in the morning that one time to borrow your lab goggles. Your bed hadn’t been touched. His was slept-in. I put two-and-two together, it wasn’t rocket science.”

“What if I made my bed that morning?” Renjun snips. “Ever think of that?”

“Yeah, you could have,” Chenle says. He leans forward again, and Renjun recoils instinctively. “I could have just made a lucky guess. But overall, whether you did or not, this isn’t a very platonic reaction to the idea of sleeping in another sentient’s bed. So you just confirmed my hypothesis for me.” He shrugs. “And that’s what you call scientific method.”

Renjun gapes, unable to speak, then slowly sinks back into his chair. The stars twinkle outside. N-0409 CTI continues its slow, drifting orbit around its mother planet. It feels wrong, somehow, like the ship should be plummeting to its surface, red alarm bells wailing in emergency, after how drastically Renjun has been knocked off his flight path. 

“Kriff, Chenle,” Donghyuck says. “I think you broke him.” 

“How have I been into my roommate this whole time,” Renjun says, screwing his eyes shut as a stress migraine begins to take root in his skull, “and no one bothered to _tell_ me? Was I supposed to just figure it out on my own? I’ve never even dated anyone before, let alone a xenospecies. Do I like him?” He turns pleading eyes to Chenle and Donghyuck. “Do I? Am I — into him? Is that what this has been, the whole time?”

“We can’t be the ones to tell you that,” Donghyuck says, softening at last. “That’s kind of the whole point.”

“But if I had to wager a guess,” Chenle says, “if you truly _weren’t_ into him, you wouldn’t have to be asking yourself that question.” 

“I wish someone could just _tell_ me what to do,” Renjun says, thoroughly miserable. He stabs a chunk of eel again and it flops off his tray and onto the floor. “Then I would know how to fix it.”

“This ain’t something you can fix, buddy. You just have a choice to make,” Chenle says. “You either keep suffering, or you grow a pair and you tell him. You can’t avoid him for the rest of the school year.”

“Renjun,” Donghyuck says gently. He meets Donghyuck’s eyes, and Renjun wobbles a little on his axis by how much genuine sympathy he finds there. “There are only a few months between now and the end of the semester. Jaemin isn’t going to be your roommate forever.”

“I know,” Renjun says, and it aches so bad he feels it his teeth with the admission. “I know.”

“We’re gonna pass our exams,” Donghyuck says. But it’s not with pride, just a simple fact. “We’ll get our placements. And then we’re shipped off to whatever godforsaken starship or outpost in some miserable corner of the galaxy that Command decides. And we stay there. For however many years they deem fit.” 

He’s looking at Renjun, but Donghyuck’s arm drifts to the side under the table, where Renjun knows he’s squeezing Chenle’s hand. “There’s a very good chance you won’t see Jaemin again for a very long time.”

It’s unlikely that Chenle and Donghyuck will get posted to the same starship. The odds aren’t in their favor. But they don’t have much to worry about. Donghyuck will follow in his mom’s footsteps and become one of the most renowned starship engineers this side of the Milky Way. Renjun can picture him now, blow-torch in hand, cog grease smeared over one brow, the manic grin he gets when he’s tinkering firmly in place.

And being in admin div and with his grades, Chenle is a natural progenitor for higher-up starship command. He’ll most likely score a cushy lieutenant position until he gravitates into becoming captain of his very own ship. Which means he’ll have authority to visit Donghyuck wherever he is in the galaxy, whenever he wants, within reason. 

But for Renjun? Jaemin will go his way, Renjun will go his. Thanks to their mortality rate, pilots are always at a shortage and desperately needed anywhere you look. But medical officers require two additional years of schooling, as opposed to the usual four. When Jaemin, Chenle, and Donghyuck leave, Renjun will be left behind. 

Once he gets his placement, Jaemin will be sent somewhere far, far away to the fringes of a cold galaxy. 

And Renjun will wake up every morning in their dorm unit, same as always, to find his bed empty. 

This last semester is all the time he has left.

“I know,” Renjun says, answering both Donghyuck and himself. Like a broken kriffing record, spinning out. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> (◍•ᴗ•◍)♡ ✧*。  
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